A community project: Vitria launches a business-to-network network

To say that one software vendor's business model may set the tone for the future of business-to-business e-commerce and service provider interconnection may be a stretch. But in the case of Vitria Technology's new business network, it's not much of one.

The idea of a trading partner community did not originate with Vitria, but the company is putting the concept into practice much to its own and its customers' benefit.

"The Vitria Business Network is a collection of all the current and future Vitria customers that are capable of electronically bonding using our software," said Malcolm Lewis, director of marketing for Vitria.

VBN customers are found throughout the service provider supply chain and include enterprise and non-telco companies. The VBN simplifies the process of finding potential trading partners and facilitating connectivity between them. Members have access to a registry of existing network members and to the interface software necessary to establish an electronic bond.

"It doesn't mean you're going to connect with [just] anybody. You still have to create the business contract, but once you have that contract, things move along a lot faster," said Kimberly Knickle, senior analyst at AMR Research. You don't have to figure out who knows how to tie the systems together."

Vitria's software platform ties systems together using three major functional components. The enterprise application integration (EAI) component delivers information and transactions between back-end systems. Another component delivers the same type of information to trading partners, typically over the Internet. The last piece, Vitria's core technology, is the business process management component that allows users to graphically model the flow of information and physically execute those models to drive information to back-end systems and trading partners.

"Vitria is known for its focus on business process-type integration. Now they are bringing the same concept to the business-to-business world," Knickle said.

Customers include IBM Global Services, Jato Communications, Nortel Networks, Rhythms NetConnections and Seibel Systems.

Vitria recently signed a $15 million deal with BellSouth that establishes its BusinessWare solution as the companywide standard for operations support system (OSS) integration and B2B e-commerce, Lewis said. "It was a watershed event because it marked the mainstream adoption of Vitria in the telco industry," he said.

As a Vitria customer, Nortel is moving toward becoming a network member. Nortel recently acquired Clarify and now includes Vitria's BusinessWare integration solution with Clarify's CommCenter customer care and trouble ticket software solution under the name CommCenter Connect.

"Every time we were in a sale in the communications industry, integration was an issue," said Trish Crawford, global manager of industry marketing at Nortel. "We recognized that having an integration solution in our product is an absolute must."

Nortel entered into an OEM agreement with Vitria and started shipping in the first quarter this year. "The market has been very pleased with our solution," Crawford said.

Clarify remains an open system and accepts connectors from other integrator applications. "We want to be able to integrate as easily with as many best-of-breed partners as we possibly can," Crawford said.

The VBN network allows just that. "The essence of the network is electronic bonding, and the essence of electronic bonding is the process-driven exchange of information and transaction between systems," Lewis said. "And the strength of Vitria's platform has always been its process management component."

The viability of Vitria's network lies in its customers. "The network is dependent on Vitria having a really high-profile customer in the network that a lot of people want to integrate with," Knickle said. Its success also lies in having a large number of companies in the network that others are likely to do business with, she said.

Vitria is aiming for both. "We expect to go from hundreds of partners to thousands very quickly," Lewis said. Support from many leading competitive carriers, OSS solutions vendors and BellSouth could position BusinessWare as the de facto standard for OSS integration.

The network has two levels of participation. As a Vitria customer, a company is automatically a non-subscribing member. Subscribing members know of non-subscribing companies and can approach them to do business. In this case, the non-subscribing company is licensed to do business only with its trading partners.

Subscribing member companies have access to information about other Vitria network members. The network contains information on each company's business, what it buys and sells, technical information on how to electronically bond with that company and the primary company contacts.

"Our own motivation is [to drive] exponential growth in software sales for us," Lewis said. "As the network gets more attractive, which it does as we add more service providers, we get more people wanting to connect, which drives even more software sales."

While many companies such as Nortel will remain open to multivendor integration, the benefit to being part of a business-to-network community is mutually inclusive. "In some ways, it is a marketing initiative because it allows Vitria to highlight what they do and talk about their product more," Knickle said. "But now companies who want to do business together and have to figure out the technical issues in automating their processes can use the network."